


the weight of your bones

by ncfan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
Genre: Gen, Hope, Loss, POV Female Character, Past Abuse, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 16:57:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7181324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Visas returns to Katarr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the weight of your bones

She did not remember much of what had come before the cataclysm. Her master and the time she had spent aboard his ship ensured that; the terrible weight of emptiness blasted memory from her skull. Her sight was clouded by the void, and the emptiness that spread beneath her skin like an infection, rooting her to the ground, turning her bones to lead. With time, she could not remember much at all; her memories were phantasms, distant dreams that flickered like the echo of the Force from lightyears away. Memory recoiled from her as the Force did from her master.

Her home world was Katarr, dead to the Force. It hung in space, a lifeless shell that sat like a rock in a rippling pond, deaf to the vibrations of the water. Her name was Visas Marr, though her master might have tried to obliterate that from memory as well. This was all she could recall with certainty.

It had happened quickly, too quickly for any of her people to escape, but not so quickly that they did not have time to realize what was happening to them. That much was still vivid—the moment of dawning realization before everything started to die, plants withering, birds falling from the sky and lying prone on the ground. Short screams that were soon snuffed out, and the only voice left was the voice of Visas Marr, and the voice of the one who found her.

And then, came the truth, as it was shown to her. She was small, a pebble tossed into a raging sea, a dust mote in the galaxy, and she was something that the void could swallow whole with ease. Visas was cast into nothingness, and there she stayed for a long time, with only the echoes of the dead for company.

Until the day when someone reached after her into the void, and took Visas’s hand in hers.

A wound in the Force was not something that could be mended after the passage of a few short years. Visas was not sure if it was something that could be mended at all. Perhaps it only left dead tissue behind, something hard as stone, but unfeeling, never healing. When Visas walked the surface of Katarr, she found it the same as she had left it. This place was deaf to the Force, and thus she found herself blind, stumbling about, trying to gain any sense of the surface.

She did not tread on grass, but dry earth, and the earth was as dust in her hands. She could not smell incense, or idanna cooking in a food stall, nor even flowers. She heard no birdsong, nor the gentle lowing of maruni in the valleys, nor the voices of her people. She heard only the wind, howling on the cold corpse of Katarr.

Visas stood in the ruins, and sighed. The ship had touched down close to where she had lived, so close that she almost expected to hear the footsteps of all those she had known. But still, there was only her. There would only ever be her. The world could not be recolonized; no plants would grow on the barren surface. The only thing that could live here was the wind.

Visas longed still for the past. She longed to hear the voices that lingered still at the periphery of her dreams, indistinct as they might have been, longed for the embrace of their owners. How many had she met who longed for the same thing ,to undo time and save a loved one, or make another choice? Not so long ago, Visas had been surrounded by people like that, people who would have given anything to rewrite something in their past, and she knew what the desire had made of them, before they had finally overcome it. The one who had drawn her out of the void was like that. The Exile was like that, clinging to a past of which she could barely even speak, until there finally came the day when she no longer allowed it to rule her.

The past was lost to her. No matter how Visas tried to grasp it, it would always slip away without a sound. Long has Visas lived within the confines of the past, sterile, unchanging, dead, but no longer. The lead was gone from her bones; she could lift her head without feeling as though there was a yoke upon her shoulders.

Katarr was a place in Visas Marr’s past. She turned away from it, and slowly shook its dust from her skirt. She would find her future, but she would not find it here.


End file.
